


Forgiveness Found 'Round the Christmas Tree

by rebelmeg



Series: Rebelmeg's Tony Stark Bingo Fills 2019 [25]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Awesome Pepper Potts, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Christmas Fluff, F/M, Forgiveness, Found Family, Precious Morgan Stark (Marvel Cinematic Universe), Tony Stark Has A Heart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-14
Updated: 2019-12-14
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:08:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21788038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rebelmeg/pseuds/rebelmeg
Summary: In a moment of weakness (or perhaps insanity) Bucky agreed to stay at the Stark's lake house over the holidays.  As he is planning to possibly jump out a window and escape, someone convinces him to stay.
Relationships: Iron Squad, James "Bucky" Barnes & Morgan Stark (Marvel Cinematic Universe), Pepper Potts/Tony Stark
Series: Rebelmeg's Tony Stark Bingo Fills 2019 [25]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1448665
Comments: 21
Kudos: 113
Collections: Bucky Barnes Bingo 2019, Ladies of Marvel Bingo 2019, Tony Stark Flash Bingo





	Forgiveness Found 'Round the Christmas Tree

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SyoshoHiataki](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SyoshoHiataki/gifts).



> I kind of stumbled into making this fic work for THREE different bingos!
> 
> TSB Flash, card 008 - hot chocolate  
> BBB Flash, card 4 - fire  
> LoM Bingo, square O3 - winter wonderland
> 
> And Witch gets all the credit, because she's weak for this kind of fluff!

Bucky couldn't believe he'd agreed to it. What on earth had possessed him to say yes to such a thing, to accept the invitation that had been as unexpected as it was bizarre?

And yet, here he sat, on Tony Stark's couch, in the Stark family's lakeside house, right across from a fire merrily burning in a huge stone fireplace while colored lights twinkled on the Christmas tree by the window. He could see snow coming down outside, falling thickly in the darkness that was illuminated by the outside lights. Had he been in any other place, it might have been comfortable and cozy.

However, he was not anywhere else, he was in _Tony Stark's house_ , and currently feeling so acutely uncomfortable he was about three seconds from heading out into the snowstorm and hiking his way back to New York, frostbite be damned.

He had nearly convinced himself to do it, he was even contemplating which exit to use, when the soft pad of light footsteps came down the stairs behind him. He looked over his shoulder to see Morgan Stark, wearing red and green plaid flannel pajamas and bright green Ninja Turtle slippers, making her way down with a well-worn pink blanket and a stuffed bunny in her arms. Even as he watched her, Bucky was startled when the little girl came around the couch and stood in front of him, the fire in big stone fireplace illuminating her from behind and making her look like a tiny, odd little Christmas angel.

"Hi, Mr. Bucky!"

He swallowed. "Hi."

She cocked her head to the side, a few wisps of brown hair falling in her face. "You've got a Grinch face on."

"A what?"

Morgan mimicked the face he was apparently making, pulling her lips and eyebrows down into an exaggerated scowl and frown. It was so comical, that Bucky almost smiled.

"Where are your mom and dad?" He glanced around, expecting them to come looking for their daughter any moment. He certainly wouldn't let any kid of his wander around the house alone with a former brainwashed assassin on the loose.

"They're upstairs." Morgan stepped closer, leaning in to brace her elbow on Bucky's knee, propping her chin in her hand and crossing one foot over the other. "Today is Daddy's sad day, so Mommy is giving him lots of hugs."

"What do you mean?" Bucky could feel his chest start to constrict. 

He knew what day it was. He was always painfully aware of this particular date in December, ever since the fiasco with Steve and Stark in Siberia. It was the date that had, more than thirty years ago, set in motion the ultimate divide that had separated the Avengers. Bucky would never forget that date ever again.

"Daddy lost his own mommy and daddy a long time ago, but he still gets sad on the day they died. Mommy said it used to be a whole week that he felt sad, but that I helped make him better." Morgan perked up at that, looking very pleased as she smiled and tapped both hands on Bucky's knees. She seemed completely oblivious to the fact that he had stopped breathing, his chest too tight as the little girl unknowingly gave him confirmation of his worst fears. He realized that he hadn't seen Stark all day except for when he and Pepper had extended their invitation for Bucky to stay over until Christmas.

Now, Bucky was immersed in his worst memories. The murders of Howard and Maria Stark opened up the doors to other murders he had committed, the blood he'd shed and the atrocities he'd wrought while under Hydra's control, and all he could think was that he had to get out, to leave this place, to get away from this family that he'd already hurt far too much—

A warm, wiggly weight with pointy elbows and knees clambered onto his lap, yanking Bucky abruptly out of the tailspin he'd been losing himself in. Morgan sighed as she got comfortable, tucking her blanket over her legs and snuggling her bunny in with her as well. "Do you know any Christmas songs, Mr. Bucky?"

Wasn't that a sharp left turn, as far as conversations went? "Uh... I-I don't know."

"Our teacher taught us a song with jingle bells, and the reindeer on the rooftop. I like doing the bells."

Bucky had a... a bit of a memory of that, he thought, singing Christmas songs loudly and with great enthusiasm as he stood on the little stage at the grade school, shaking strings of jingle bells with all his might alongside his classmates. 

He remembered something else, too, now that he had a few fragments of Christmas songs in his head. Something very, very different that occurred years later. Sitting around on hard benches in the mud in Europe, watching pretty girls that sang and loud men that would perform for the soldiers, dressed up in colorful costumes.

"I think I remember a few songs." Bucky said slowly, a few of them coming back to him. Without really thinking about it, he hummed a few bars of _Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas_.

"I know that one," Morgan piped up. "That one makes Mommy sad sometimes, but I don't know why."

"Well, it used to make us soldiers cry too. When we were missing home." Bucky remembered that, too. Scrubbing the tears off his cold face with the rough sleeve of his army jacket, feeling raw inside and out.

Morgan nodded wisely, plucking at the ears of her bunny to make them stand up and flop over. "What other Christmas songs do you know?"

"I think... is it called _White Christmas_?"

"Daddy likes that movie. He's watched it like a million times." Morgan rolled her eyes as she spoke.

Bucky didn't realize that one end of his mouth had curled into a smile. "I haven't seen that one."

"Don't worry, you will," Morgan promised, with an odd mix of innocence and foreboding. With more wiggling and a great deal of jabbing Bucky in the ribs, thighs, and nearly his groin with her pointy little elbows, she had turned around on his lap and started playing with his hair and running her fingers through his beard. It was one of the weirder things that Bucky had ever experienced. "Your face hair is longer than Daddy's. He says it makes him look like a grandpa when he lets it be long."

Bucky found himself chuckling at that. "Maybe I've just got a better face for it."

"He growed his head hair out when I was littler, Mommy liked it. She played with it all the time." Morgan toyed with Bucky's hair as she talked, twisting the locks around her fingers and tugging on them lightly, then piling it up on top of his head. "She plays with my hair too, but it doesn't stay."

Bucky gave Morgan's hair a gentle tug of his own. "I learned how to braid mine when I was staying with some friends. If I didn't keep it back, I had a goat that was kind of a jerk and liked to try and eat my hair."

Morgan giggled at that, her eyes sparkling. "Goats don't eat hair!"

"Hey, goats will eat anything, especially if they know they're not supposed to." He tucked his chin down to see what she was doing, twisting a few locks of his hair together. "Do you know how to braid hair?"

Morgan shook her head, a yawn escaping her, and Bucky suddenly noticed the shadows of tiredness under her eyes. "No, but you can show me tomorrow." With a deep sigh, the kind of weary sigh that only a slightly dramatic child can manage, she pulled at her blanket, trying to get it around her shoulders. Bucky helped her, then nearly startled when she curled right up against his chest, her head tucked under his chin. His arms came up around the little girl automatically, the motion unfamiliar and yet somehow easy, and as Morgan sighed again and relaxed, Bucky found himself feeling... overwhelmed. Somehow his insides were too big for his body, and his throat ached with sudden tears, and this little girl with her Ninja Turtle slippers and her stuffed bunny and her sweet, earnest eyes had managed to turn him inside out with nothing more than an anecdote about jingle bells and a tug on his hair.

Bucky could feel himself shaking, trying to hold in all the emotions that were drowning him, when Morgan gave his arm a tap and murmured sleepily, "You should sing another Christmas song, Mr. Bucky."

He hummed tunelessly for a few minutes, mentally scrambling to think of another song he knew besides _Jingle Bells_ , when he happened to glance out the window again. Snow was still swirling down heavily, and though he had forgotten most of the words, the tune to _Winter Wonderland_ came to mind. As he hummed it, he watched the snow falling past the window, the way it had already made a thick blanket of white outside, even the shores and shallows of the lake had frozen over enough to have a covering. Who knew how much snow would fall by morning, how deep it might get? Would Morgan go out and play in it, tromping paths through the snow that was already more than knee-high on her? Bucky remembered that when he was a kid, visiting his grandparents who lived further upstate, with more open spaces that always had snow during the holidays, running out into the cold with his coat flapping around him and snow sticking to his pants as he romped around in the snow with his sisters and cousins.

Morgan's breathing had turned deep and even as he hummed, and Bucky was fairly certain she was faintly snoring several minutes later when he heard another set of footsteps on the stairs. He didn't dare turn around, not wanting to wake Morgan, but a moment later Pepper came into his peripheral vision. He stiffened automatically, realizing that she might not take too kindly to an ex-assassin holding her daughter, but Pepper merely smiled at him. She went into the kitchen, just off to his left, and got to work making hot chocolate. Morgan shifted in her sleep, mumbling something unintelligible, and Bucky hurriedly started humming _Jingle Bells_. She settled immediately, making Bucky feel both awkward and bizarrely proud.

The sound of a car driving up, as well as the flash of headlights through the window, had him watching between the windows, doors, and Pepper with a mixture of apprehension and curiosity. She didn't seem at all concerned, however, and it became apparent why when she opened the door to a snow-dusted Colonel Rhodes, the alien Nebula, and Happy Hogan. They all glanced at Bucky, nodding and, in Colonel Rhodes' case, smiling. Then they just milled around in the kitchen with Pepper, talking quietly while they took off coats, hats, and gloves and set them out to dry. Pepper had clearly been expecting them, and started handing out mugs of hot chocolate with tiny peppermint candy canes hooked over the rims of the cups. Rhodey gestured for Nebula to precede him into the living room, and Bucky nearly jumped out of his seat when the blue alien sat down right next to him, as if there was nothing unusual about it. Rhodey, his leg braces whirring quietly, perched himself on the arm of the couch next to Nebula, and gave the sleeping Morgan a fond glance. 

Bucky was about to offer her over when Pepper sat on his other side, holding out a mug of cocoa with a smile. Feeling almost as if he were accepting a ticking bomb, Bucky held the mug in his prosthetic hand and just looked at it for a minute.

Happy had settled himself in a large, comfortable armchair adjacent to Pepper, and they all seemed perfectly to content to just... sit there. Not talking, just sitting around the fire while the Christmas tree continued to twinkle, and Morgan's soft sleepy sounds played a soundtrack to it all. Was this... normal? Was this something normal people did, just sat around and drank hot chocolate and pretended like there wasn't a barely-recovered enemy right in their midst?

Bucky had just carefully sipped at his hot chocolate (quite a trick with a five year old lying on his chest), and was looking around at the others out of the corners of his eyes when he heard it. More footsteps on the stairs, and there was only one other person it could be. He risked it this time, looking over his shoulder, ignoring the tiny disgruntled mumble Morgan made into his collarbone.

Stark looked tired, his hair was a bit of a mess and his eyes were definitely a bit red and puffy. But as he locked eyes with Bucky, the most inexplicable thing happened. Despite the date, and who they both were, and the whole awful, bloody history between the two of them... Tony Stark looked Bucky Barnes right in the eye and smiled at him.

It was a small smile, nothing like the shiny, somehow snarky grins that he used to show the press. It was just a soft, genuine smile that Bucky wasn't sure if it felt more like a blow to the gut or a wave of warmth. Maybe something in between? He didn't know, and the lack of knowing made him feel like he was balancing on a tightrope that was an unknown distance from the ground.

Pepper was also looking over her shoulder, and she smiled at her husband like he was her favorite thing to look at. She gestured to the last mug of cocoa on the counter in the kitchen, and Tony grabbed it and turned on some Christmas music at a low volume before joining the rest of them. He wiggled his way onto the couch next to Pepper, making her scoot closer to Bucky, which made him scoot closer to Nebula, and there definitely wasn't enough room on the couch for all four of them to sit comfortably with their own personal space.

But... somehow it was nice anyway. In an overly warm, slightly too close for comfort kind of way, and for some reason that made Bucky think of all the times his little sisters, or even Steve on occasion, had crawled into his bed in the middle of the night because they were scared or it was cold. It was something that felt like... like family, and Bucky didn't know what to do with that.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Pepper hold up her phone, the screen lit and displaying a message.

_From Tony:  
You didn't do it, Snowflake. Hydra did. You were just the tool they picked that day. We're okay._

Bucky glanced over to where Tony was watching him, waiting for a reaction, and the man smiled again, shrugging his shoulders. Reaching over Pepper, Tony clinked the edge of his mug with Bucky's, then settled in more comfortably next to his wife and sipped at his cocoa as he watched the fire.

Morgan breathed deeply in her sleep, her little chest rising and falling against Bucky's. Nebula and Pepper were both warm and close on either side of him, Rhodey and Happy both looked perfectly content, and Tony's head was tilted to rest against his Pepper's as she reached over to briefly squeeze Bucky's arm.

To be honest... he still didn't understand. He suspected this might be some sort of ritual, some kind of family tradition, the hot chocolate and fire and tree and music and snow and... cuddle pile? He didn't know.

But sitting there surrounded by all these people that he would never have guessed would be fine with being in the same room with him, being treated like he was just another one of them, Bucky had to admit... he liked it. He didn't have to understand it to like it. Although if he was continuing to be honest with himself, there was one thing that he was pretty sure he did understand.

Forgiveness could be expressed in a lot of different ways, couldn't it? This one just happened to include a little girl, a mug of hot chocolate, and a found family gathered around a fire.


End file.
